All DONE!!!

     It’s official; I had my last day of chemotherapy on Tuesday!!!! This is definitely a big milestone. Remember nine weeks ago when I was first starting this thing and I was nervous about going in for my first day? I really can’t believe it’s been over two months and that I actually finished this without anything going seriously wrong. I’ve had a lot of bad days, I lost my hair, I’ve changed so much physically… but from now on I can just look forward to improving little by little every day. I must say, overall my experience at Beth Israel has been fantastic. My chemo nurses even got me this cute little pin to celebrate my last day of chemo. Maybe I’ll be lucky and it’ll help make it snow (I love the snow!). 

    Of course, it’s not entirely smooth sailing from here on out. In fact, I had kind of an unpleasant visit to the emergency department last night. I started feeling sudden chest pain in the afternoon, and so my doctors said I had to go in and get it checked out. Turns out having cancer and undergoing chemo predisposes me to blood clots, so they really had to do a CT to make sure I wasn’t having a pulmonary embolus (a clot in my lung). It took a whole lot of tries to finally get an IV in my arm (my veins are tired of being used and abused) but in the end it all went well. This is a good news/ bad news situation. Good news: I did not have a pulmonary embolus, and although there’s no good reason for my chest pain at least it was nothing serious and I got to go home last night. Bad news: My CT showed five nodules in my lungs. Given my history of cancer, the immediate concern is that they might be metastases of my tumor. That’s not the ONLY thing they could be, and in fact it seems pretty unlikely given that I just finished chemotherapy, but it’s still concerning and it has to be checked out. Bummer, but I have an appointment with my oncologist this afternoon to see how we’ll proceed. 

Faking a smile

Hopefully my last IV for a very long time

   On a much happier note, guess who is on the cover of the BIDMC Quarterly? That would be me!! Don’t know what the BIDMC Quarterly is? Well, its only the coolest magazine in the world, and also Beth Israel’s internal publication about the goings-on at the hospital. Turns out the photographers for the “Look Good Feel Better” event that I went to a few months ago were taking photos for the magazine. It’s just a small article on the inside with a few paragraphs about the event, but I’m excited for my first cover anyway. Funny story: none of my nurses from chemo recognized me on the cover, because none of them knew me when I had my normal brown hair! Would you have recognized me based on this photo?

   Well, now that I’m all done with chemo I am looking forward to all the awesome stuff that I can do as I start to feel better. One of my next posts will have to be a list (yay!) of things I want to enjoy, eat, accomplish, or attempt in my post-cancer life. Stay tuned!